You have heard of Elon Musk. You have heard of animals that die. Now get ready to combine the two in today’s terrible story: Animals may be dying because of Elon Musk.
Reuters reports that Musk’s medical technology company, Neuralink, is currently under investigation by the US government for potentially violating animal welfare laws. Animals are reportedly suffering and dying in Neuralink labs on a larger scale than necessary due to Musk’s push to speed up development – and in many cases the deaths don’t even provide valuable research data.
The main objective of Neuralink is to develop a brain implant designed to help people who are paralyzed or have neurological problems. Like many other medical technology companies, Neuralink does animal testing in its research, such as implanting chips in the spines of pigs or monkey brains. Animal deaths are unfortunately expected in such research, with test subjects often being euthanized after the end of an experiment.
However, Neuralink’s casualty count would have been much higher than necessary, as Musk’s rushed deadlines apparently resulted in increased pressure and avoidable mistakes. This would have led to botched experiments, repeated testing and unnecessary deaths.
To make matters worse, the deaths of many of these animals were apparently not painless. Mistakes in Neuralink’s experiments would have caused unnecessary suffering, while simultaneously producing data of questionable quality. Such cases would have included surgeons using the wrong surgical glue, implanting the Neuralink device on the wrong vertebrae, and implanting the wrong size devices.
According to documents seen by Reuters, Neuralink has killed around 1,500 animals since 2018, including pigs, monkeys, mice and rats.
Of course, the number of animal deaths isn’t necessarily an indication that Neuralink did anything wrong. A big company doing large-scale animal experiments logically leads to a large number of deaths. Reuters also notes that Neuralink reportedly treats animals relatively well compared to other labs, until they are actually experimented on and killed.
Yet even taking this into account, internal documents and Reuters interviews with more than 20 former and current employees indicate that Neuralink test animals suffered and died on a greater scale than necessary due to the Musk’s demands for researchers to speed up their work.
The Neuralink investigation is believed to be led by the US Department of Agriculture and focuses on animal welfare law. Reuters couldn’t specifically confirm whether these were the allegations of employees it spoke to, but it’s a safe bet. If the investigation is unrelated to these allegations, it would mean that Neuralink has even more potential animal welfare issues, which is not a reality that anyone would want to consider.
Last week, Musk announced that Neuralink could be ready to begin human trials within the next six months, subject to U.S. Food and Drug Administration approval. It would, however, be advisable to take this proclamation with a huge pillar of salt. Even putting aside recent revelations about Neuralink’s animal testing, Musk has a habit of stating unrealistic and optimistic timelines and failing to deliver.
In 2016, Musk said that Tesla is set to demonstrate self-driving travel across the US in 2017. This does not happen. In 2018, Musk said he would launch two cargo missions to Mars in 2022. This does not happen. Musk even previously announced that human testing for Neuralink would begin in 2020, then 2022. That didn’t happen either.
It will be truly shocking if Neuralink begins human trials in six months. But even if that’s the case, you’ll probably want to think a lot before undergoing invasive brain surgery to let the richest man in the world implant a chip in your gray matter.
